On remote work
The professional – and personal – considerations of building a remote-first company
We started Antenna over 5 years ago. Months into our existence, the pandemic hit. At that point, we were a mighty team of 6, with just 3 full-time employees. Already, we were a global, remote team — and the pandemic ensured that we would build Antenna as a remote-first company.
From a company’s perspective
Fast forward 5 years, we've hired dozens of amazing professionals all across the world. Even our US based employees hail from all over the globe, and spend months each year in their countries of origin.
There's lots of debate these days on which model is better: remote, in-person, hybrid? Whatever your preference, one thing is clear to me: Antenna, at its current talent-density, would not exist in any other format besides remote-first.
Today, I want to explore from both a company and a personal perspective: how can you make remote-first work for you?
Of course, there are tradeoffs
To be clear, there are (well-documented) tradeoffs. Sometimes it’s just easier to get in a room to solve an open-ended problem. And you don’t develop nearly as close of a relationship with a head on Zoom as you do a human in reality. It’s especially difficult for entry-level employees with no prior work experience. Maybe your below average employees work 20% less. I will let someone else expound on those.
These tradeoffs are often amplified at companies that were around long before the pandemic. Because we’ve been remote first from day 1, Antenna has the luxury of all the best practices: tight documentation, religious use of Jira (and other software), no real estate expenses to allow for flexibility of spending elsewhere, and so on.
Lastly, I can imagine a scale where it becomes “just a job” for most people at the company. Once the majority of your employee base has lost internal motivation, all bets are off. Luckily, we’re far from that point.
And, of course, there are benefits
Being remote definitely helps attract talent and take advantage of lower cost of living (but not lower talent) locations. Our founding Engineer lived in a cabin in Vermont. Our first developer was in the Netherlands. We have employees all over the U.S. — and recently launched “Antenna South” in Medellin, Colombia. Unless you’re building OpenAI, finding creative ways to win the war for talent is very important.
It also helps attract a diversity of experiences. We have a number of parents on the team, who would not otherwise consider Antenna. Because we’re so geographically dispersed, it’s an unsaid truth, that we likely hold a variety of ideological viewpoints. Given this fact, we all to show up for the work and not other secondary causes.
While remote first offers tons of flexibility, it does not mean we work less. In fact, it may well be the opposite. When your home is your office, you’re “at the office” between 8-10PM, as evidenced by my furious late night emails most nights. Slack may have invented the “schedule send” feature just for me.
Often, we can have our cake and eat it too: unless you’re actually on vacation, if you have an internet connection, you can be where you want, and still contribute. This might just be the best retention mechanism ever invented for high performing employees.
Remote first ≠ Fully remote
And, as much as I believe in remote-first — I do not believe in fully remote. We see each other a lot! Without intentional in-person, remote-first would break, except for the few exceptions that prove the rule (GitLab, Zapier). To ensure we're getting the benefits of healthy in-person dynamics we do the following:
When you add all of these up, that’s quite a bit of in-person time. As a result, we’ve developed great interpersonal relationships and know how to use in-person to our advantage. And it doesn’t even cost us 90 minutes and $22 per day in Sweetgreen lunch breaks.
I also do not believe in hybrid work, where some portion of employees are office-first, and others are remote-first. I’ve worked in this environment before, as a remote-first worker, and I was a second-class citizen in this dynamic. The consequence is often that remote employees are treated like outsourced labor while all critical thinking takes place at HQ. Not to mention that ~100% of hybrid meetings I’ve been a part, to this day, of have started off with 15 minutes of IT adjustment in spite of all the great technology we have. Highly do not recommend.
Dollars & Cents: how much does all this cost?
Jason Fried of Basecamp recently posted the costs of their last 6 company retreats. To be clear, $5K+ per person is an amazing retreat. Antenna is able to organize full company retreats for ~$2K per person that are also amazing, albeit slightly less indulgent than I imagine Basecamp’s are. Again, when you don’t have any rent expense, you have a lot of flexibility in this budget.
From an individual’s perspective
So, trust me, you can do it. Remote-first can work really well. It’s not an ideological battle. It’s a practical matter. If you’re smart, you can manage the tradeoffs and double down on the unique benefits.
I’m much more worried about the personal consequences. Humans, unfortunately (?), aren’t just productivity machines; they’re social creatures. Sitting home alone all day is lonely. Prior to the pandemic, the office solved not only for productivity but also for loneliness. However, technology unbundled the office’s multiple roles, and the pandemic was the catalyst that forced us to confront that fact. As a result, the role of the office has fundamentally changed.
Bottom line: Technology has ensured that an office is no longer required to be the primary workspace. Excellent work can be done in many configurations. However, the office served as the primary social community for most working adults. The primary remaining role of the office isn’t to ensure productivity, it’s to prevent loneliness.
So, if the office’s primary role is to fulfill social satisfaction – and a lot of workers no longer frequent an office – what gives?
I’m frankly really worried about this point. The office provided such an easy way to get your social fix. Employers to employees: “No effort required, just show up, we’ll take care of your need.”
Now, it takes proactive effort on the part of each remote employee. Having moved from NYC to the DC suburbs over the course of the pandemic, I’m in the process of rebuilding my professional-social stack. Here’s where I’m at:
Regular trips to visit colleagues, clients, and professional peers in person. I make it a point to go to NYC every couple weeks and, when I’m there, have 5+ in-person meetings in a single day.
Joining a professional network in DC with like-minded professionals. I’m considering YPO. Let’s see how it goes.
Attempt to cowork at a local coworking 1X / week.
Join a cycling team for another local group of like-minded friends.
When you add this all up, I’m getting nearly as much interaction as a hybrid worker — and it’s much more intentional.
But not everyone is this proactive: I am worried about those who do not take initiative and find themselves drifting slowly into loneliness. If I were a People Ops leader at scale, this is the #1 issue I’m thinking about. How do I help solve the loneliness problem for my employees knowing the office is no longer my primary tool to do so? And, if you are someone who has thought deeply about this, reach out, I’d love to learn from you.
Postscript (or, as the Acquired guys call it, “Carveouts”)
A complete aside: what I’m reading
I’ve always loved these recommendations from others whose writing I respect, so I thought I’d add the 5 most interesting things I read this week. None of this has anything to do with remote-first work :).
Remembering the Face of Your Father on The Epsilon Theory blog. Incredible reminder about the current (lack of) emphasis on the past plus a timely nod to the way LLMs can recreate names, images, and likenesses of people living, dead, and unborn for a variety of use cases.
Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class by Rob Henderson. A page-turner that reset my perspective on how privileged I am – and how that impacts all of my beliefs – but not at all in the way you’d think based on how we use the term ‘privilege’ today.
ZoomInfo Go-to-market playbook. Henry Schuck, the Founder/CEO, of ZoomInfo posted this free to the world last week. It’s one of the most compelling pieces of product marketing I’ve ever seen from a data company. I challenge you to answer the question “how do you use our product” better than this. The fact that this is free and widely available is amazing. The internet is undefeated.
The Complete History & Strategy of Meta on the Acquired podcast (not to be confused with the Zuck interview). Since as long as I’ve been enthralled by technology & startups, I’ve thought Zuck was the single greatest living entrepreneur – but for the last 5 years – I all but gave up this belief – until “new Zuck” reemerged. This episode does an incredible job highlighting just how far ahead this guy is than everyone else. Aut Zuck aut nihil.
Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO). Super refreshing to have a deep subject matter expert give an honest (and realistic) assessment of the promises & risks of AI. Almost everything I read on AI (both for & against) is, in my opinion, hand-wavy bullshit. This is not.